At the D technology conference in San Diego last May, Yahoo CEO Terry Semel was explaining why his company turned over information that likely helped Chinese authorities sentence a journalist to 10 years in prison. Yahoo, Semel reasoned, had to obey the laws of the land in which it operated.

"It hit me hard," said Pishevar, whose family fled Iran after the 1979 revolution there. "I thought about apartheid and the Nazis. I thought that if Yahoo was around in the 1930s, Anne Frank might have been blogging instead of writing in a diary. I asked Semel if he would have cooperated with the Nazis in that case." Semel responded that he didn't know how he would feel in such a situation, according to reports of the exchange.

Pishevar's tough question of the embattled Yahoo exec received wide media coverage, thrusting Pishevar into the limelight. But he's no activist. He's president of the Web site publishing company Freewebs, founded by four brothers from Afghanistan whose family had a similar experience running from political persecution: they fled to the U.S. in 1983 after their father was imprisoned for six months, without being charged, by the Communist Afghan government backed by the Soviet Union.

One could say free speech hits home for Freewebs' founders and executives because they've had firsthand experience with oppressive governments, said Haroon Mokhtarzada, one of the founding brothers. In 2001, Mokhtarzada, who was 23 at the time, and two of his brothers set out to build a profitable company that would also be guided by simple principles: make the Internet accessible to anyone and protect users' rights to express themselves freely.

Freewebs invites people to build their own Web sites using the company's software tools, which are "easy enough for anyone's grandmother to use," boasted Mokhtarzada. Headquartered in Silver Spring, Md., the company sees 18 million monthly visitors, according to Media Metrix, and hosts more than 15 million Web sites. The privately held company supports itself through advertising sales.

The widget factor
Recently, Freewebs branched into widgets, the term used to describe icons or graphical interfaces that give users a quick way to perform tasks on their computer via dialog boxes, icons or menu bars. In addition to offering users a way to load video, photographs, music and text to their Web sites, the company is now creating customizable widgets, which include one launched last month that lets users host forum discussions from anywhere on the Web. Freewebs Forums can be hosted on someone's Web site or social-networking page and be accessed without leaving those areas. Users can register, reply and file posts to the forum without leaving the widget.

Plenty of companies, such as MySpace.com, Blogger.com or WordPress, offer blogging tools or other software to create a Web presence. "But Freewebs has all these widgets on the site which make it more dynamic," said Charlene Li, an analyst with Forrester Research. "You don't want to just offer users text or photos. Freewebs enables users to create Web pages through a large variety of widgets, which is pretty smart."

About the author

Greg Sandoval covers media and digital entertainment for CNET News. Based in New York, Sandoval is a former reporter for The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. E-mail Greg, or follow him on Twitter at @sandoCNET.
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